Innholdsfortegnelse for 54.3 Fall 2021 i British Columbia History

Dear Editor, After reading about the SS Master in your spring issue, I was inspired to reach out. We are a tour operator in the Greater Vancouver region, and we offer tours of the West Coast aboard a historic BC-built tugboat called the Union Jack. A classic wooden tugboat, the Union Jack is a significant piece of Canadian maritime history and celebrates 80 years of coastal journeys in 2021. The Union Jack was purchased by Mark McColman and Neil Wurst in May 2014. “We were attracted to the Union Jack the minute we saw her and felt compelled to be a part of her historical journey. The pulse of the old heavy Union engine is the real heart of the vessel. I couldn’t rid myself of the sense of adventure…

The Ida Halpern fonds is a remarkable collection of audiovisual, textual, and photographic records documenting the songs, ceremonies, and culture of the northwest coast of Canada. Between the 1940s and 1980s, ethnomusicologist Ida Halpern captured an unprecedented quantity of sound recordings of cultural creations from leading Elders in Kwakwaka’wakw, Nuu-chah-nulth, Haida, and Coast Salish communities. Her textual records include musical analyses of the songs and a wealth of information about the ceremonies derived from interviews with the Elders involved in the recordings. Singers recorded by Halpern include Mungo Martin (Nakapenkem or Datsa), Pasala (Chief Billy Assu), George Clutesi, Florence Edenshaw Davidson, Gertrude Kelley, Tom Willie, Peter Webster, Joe Titian, Dan Cranmer, Stanley Hunt, Fred Lewis, Ella Thompson, Louis Miranda, Chief Adam Shewish, and Margaret Shewish. Many Elders and singers recorded…

On a hot summer day in 2005, I walked the dusty road through the former village of Paldi with author Joan Mayo. A century ago, Paldi (11 km northwest of Duncan, on Vancouver Island) was the bustling centre of sawmilling and logging operations established by the Mayo Lumber Company in 1917. Joan pointed out where families once lived—the Toyotas, before they were interned during the war; the Yips; and the many South Asian families, like those of company founders Attar Doman Singh and Kapoor Singh Siddoo. Mayo’s operations were successful, developing just as the forest industry was expanding to play a major role in BC’s economy. They provided a livelihood for South Asian workers and their families and for immigrants of Japanese, Chinese, and Caucasian ancestries. Paldi was a refuge…

Where do we find history? What does each source tell us about what happened in the past? If we’re looking for factual information, we explore documents such as census records—as Andrea Lister did in her how-to article about searching the census for Indigenous people in BC. If we’re looking for stories from and about the past, and their legacies in the modern world, we talk and listen. Interviews record people’s lived experience. Family stories such as those shared in the newly made musical heritage of the Good family’s Ay Lelum fashion label and Winnie L. Cheung’s recollections of her mother’s attachment to Cantonese opera are a rich source of history. They have the added benefit of containing personal reflection expressed in thoughts and feelings about events of the past. Songs…

Vancouver Fashion Week was the catalyst for two fashion designers to create contemporary Coast Salish music with their family. Aunalee Boyd-Good and Sophia Seward-Good are the sisters behind Ay Lelum, The Good House of Design, a second-generation Coast Salish design house. When they needed original music for their Vancouver Fashion Week showcase in 2018, they collaborated with their family of artists for ideas. “We didn’t know where to start,” says Aunalee Boyd-Good. “The challenge for recording music is—where do you begin?”1 Their father, Tseskinakhen William Good—hereditary chief, master carver, and knowledge keeper from the Snuneymuxw First Nation—has his own traditional songs. But it was their brother, artist W. Joel Good, who suggested they contact Juno-award winning and multi-platinum producer Rob the Viking in Nanaimo for beats.2 The collaborative process between…

BC History was lucky to catch up with Winnie L. Cheung, Executive Director of the Pacific Canada Heritage Centre–Museum of Migration (PCHC-MoM). Your connection to Cantonese opera is a deeply personal one. Can you tell us about it? I am the eldest of seven children. My mother loved Cantonese opera. When we were little, Cantonese opera was played on the radio in Hong Kong many hours a day, and we were immersed in it. We knew the words and were able to sing the tunes. My mother is now turning 90—and even though she came from a family where the father was very, very educated, she was illiterate. People in her age group had gone through the horrific years of the Sino-Japanese War, and she lost her childhood that way,…

I get choked up every November, not only because I think about my own family’s service in the Canadian Armed Forces, but everybody’s. I am sad for the losses and amazed at the resilience of people. I was moved to write about National Aboriginal Veterans’ Day because I want to add an extra layer of information about how long it took for Indigenous veterans to receive the same treatment as their non-Indigenous counterparts. I want to share this with you here so we can all be aware of the battles that some of our veterans had to continue to fight and why we celebrate and remember them, their work, and their accomplishments for a country that did not even accept them as citizens.1 Of the 12,000 Indigenous men and women…

Anniversaries are often celebrated with a gift. For Kwantlen Polytechnic University, the gift came in the form of a new dedicated space for the KPU Archives. The opportunity to create an Archives Research Room in the library (Surrey Campus), coincided not only with the institution’s 40th anniversary, but with the relocation of a student-related group to another building. The space, vacated in December 2020, was transformed with paint, furnishings, and shelving by April 1, coincidentally the date Kwantlen College officially split from Douglas College in 1981 to become a separate institution. The Archives Research Room—69 square metres plus an office—offers a warm, light-filled welcome to visitors and an opportunity to display previously hidden, and sometimes quirky, treasures such as a sweatshirt from 1992 that belonged to former faculty member Fraser…

In 1899, at the church on the Coldwater Reserve, two widowed mothers and neighbours married two Nicola Valley cowboys. Daniela (Gutierrez) Shuttleworth and Johnny Garcia married in the spring; Pauline (Sisyesq’et) Tinmelsh and Henry Charters married in the summer. Daniela was probably in her 28th year, making her about five years older than her groom. Pauline was probably in her 32nd year, perhaps six years older than her groom. Johnny and Henry were locals; their brides were not. Daniela was born in Hope; Pauline in Deadman’s Creek, in the Thompson countryside.1 Their parents were present for, and either enabled or contested, the 19th century transitions from what had been a Hudson’s Bay Company fur-trade district into a British gold rush colony, and then into a Canadian province. The women’s mothers…

The songs and verses written in and about British Columbia in the period 1890 to 1914 allow us a fascinating look into the culture of past times. This is particularly so for the region of BC known as the West Kootenay. This era saw the establishment of the region as a mining centre, and it has been a song prospector’s dream, with rich pickings. The BC collector par excellence was Philip J. Thomas (1921–2007). Between the years 1954 and 1975, he gathered from singers around the province a collection of some 500 songs and recitations, many of them based in the primary industries of fishing, mining, and logging, and much of what he found came from the West Kootenay. Phil Thomas collected songs from people who had learned them in…

While volunteering at the Penticton Museum and Archives, I became aware of the incredible contributions made by pioneer women who helped support the first two Penticton hospitals in the years 1912 to 1939. Their efforts have now faded from public awareness—and there are no street names or city monuments to commemorate them. Married women were identified in the records of the day by their husband’s first name or initials, which made finding information on these women challenging. Penticton, located in the southern Okanagan Valley, is nestled between two lakes: Skaha, on the south, and the much larger Okanagan to the north. For thousands of years, the area had been occupied by the Sylix people. Penticton is thought to be derived from an Interior Salish word—“pentkin”—commonly translated to mean “a place…

The popular singer Lucille Starr is known mostly for her huge hits, “When the Sun Says Hello to the Mountains” and “Jolie Jacqueline.” She was the first female country music singer in Canada to sell more than one million records, the first woman to be enshrined in the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame, and the first woman from Canada to perform on the legendary stage of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. Born Lucille Marie Raymonde Savoie in Saint-Boniface, Manitoba, she grew up in the village of Maillardville, BC, since absorbed into the city of Coquitlam. She left Canada with her first husband, Bob Regan, to launch a career in Los Angeles under the name The Canadian Sweethearts. Later, star bandmaster Herb Alpert took Lucille under his wing, and…

Loki the Magpie is a tad lonely. He’s accustomed to swapping tales with visitors to the animal biome at the Exploration Place Museum and Science Centre in Prince George, but when the facility was forced to close during the COVID-19 pandemic, things suddenly got a lot quieter. Loki thrives on interaction with people and is known to quote back phrases or summon his own, like, “Hey you, come here!” The bird enjoys being at the centre of attention, and like everyone else at Exploration Place, is keen to greet more humans. During the pandemic closure, Exploration Place was able to undertake major reconstruction of gallery spaces and curate new exhibits. Staff have also collaborated with the Maiyoo Keyoh Society to help repatriate a headdress that belonged to a hereditary chief…